him?"

The girl's eyes fell, and she pushed her knife against her plate. She
began: "No--"

"Then confound his impudence!" the general broke out. "What business has
he to write to you at all about this?"

"Because he couldn't go away without it!" she returned; and she met her
father's eye courageously. "He had a right to think we were his friends;
and if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way, isn't it manly of
him to wish to tell us first himself?"

Her father could not say that it was not. But he could and did say, very
sceptically: "Stuff! Now, see here, Agatha: what are you going to do?"

"I'm going to see Mrs. March, and then--"

"You mustn't do anything of the kind, my dear," said her father, gently.
"You've no right to give yourself away to that romantic old goose." He
put up his hand to interrupt her protest. "This thing has got to be gone
to the bottom of. But you're not to do it. I will see March myself. We
must consider your dignity in this matter--and mine. And you may as well
understand that I'm not going to have any nonsense. It's got to be
managed so that it can't be supposed we're anxious about it, one way or
the other, or that he was authorized to write to you in this way--"

"No, no! He oughtn't to have done so. He was to blame. He couldn't have
written to you, though, papa--"

"Well, I don't know why. But that's no reason why we should let it be
understood that he has written to you. I will see March; and I will
manage to see his wife, too. I shall probably find them in the
reading-room at Pupp's, and--"

The Marches were in fact just coming in from their breakfast at the
Posthof, and he met them at the door of Pupp's, where they all sat down
on one of the iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask one another
questions of their minds about the pleasure of the day before, and to
beat about the bush where Burnamy lurked in their common consciousness.

Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him. "You knew," she
said, "that Mr. Burnamy had left us?"

"Left! Why?" asked the general.

She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best to
trust her husband's poverty of invention. She looked at him, and he
answered for her with a promptness that made her quake at first, but
finally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing: "He's had some
trouble with Stoller." He went on to tell the general just what the
trouble was.

At the end the general grunted